Nightmare Spectre
by Side Quest Publications
Summary: In which Guardian Spectre has recurring nightmares about when the Legion had abducted him, and a few other characters give their own thoughts on the incident. Timing is all over the place, but takes place within my Spectres of the Past fanfic.


**In which I explore a possible version of Spectre's abduction by the Dark Legion, and offer a few other characters' opinions on the matter.**

**The original abduction is written, by design, as a recurring nightmare that Spectre has, never truly remembering what happened except in his dreams.**

**Timing is kind of weird: the original event that prompted the dream occurred-well, whenever you want to believe Spectre got his cybernetics, but within the context of my own version of events, I'd say somewhere between Chapter 4 and 6 of my long fic Specters of the Past.  
The following scene after he'd awakened would take place only a few hours after the intro, but within the context of my fanfics would be between Spectres of the Past and Uneasy Alliances, an account of I've got Spectre re-married to his "canon" wife Kali-Ka-merely an idea that allows my headcanon to coexist with official canon, nothing more. (I'll need to rewrite a few scenes to account for some of those changes to my fic-the rewritten versions are already available on deviantArt.)  
And the final scene goes right back to Chapter 6, immediately after the Constable learns about that little Dark Legion device Kancho had found in Spectre's old home. In fact, Tyson and Elys-Ia are the "former Legionnaires" who identified the piece for him.**

**The technomage twins Tyson and Elys-Ia belong to me; everyone else belongs to Archie, Sega, et cetera.**

* * *

_Echidnaopolis Community Homes  
Spectre and Kali-Ka's house  
shortly after dusk  
_  
Every night, another terror came. No matter where they came from — his memories, his madness — the nightmares never left him alone.

Most of them happened once, and never again, though they were no less fearsome for that. But the worst of them, the _very_ worst, visited him time and again, replaying the same details again and again, without the slightest hint that it might be a new dream.

Tonight he had such a dream.

_Floating Island  
Haven  
many years ago, midnight  
_  
First, one of the voices would start screaming in his head. Aaron, the child, as he recalled; the others did not begin showing themselves until after Spectre had grown.

Aaron screamed at him until he woke. He jerked upright, lost his balance, and fell out of bed before the intruder could grab him.

The intruder carried a small form in one hand. The chameleon, Kancho. Such was the way of dreams, that Spectre could know details _here_ that he would never have remembered while awake; these dreams were the only time he ever remembered her name.

And yet, he could never see his attacker's face, never recognize his voice, though he knew the man was very familiar to him.

The name Aaron kept repeating, "Moritori Rex" — the king of death, if Spectre remembered his language studies correctly, or the king of those about to die — did not help matters.

Moritori grasped the chameleon in one hand by the back of her neck. In the other, he held a syringe. The chameleon hung limp, unconscious. Moritori threw her across the room, leaving her in a sprawled heap where she landed, before he found Spectre cowering on the floor.

Aaron was in Spectre's head again, urging him, pleading with him, reminding him that there was an alarm just a few feet from his hand. But Spectre was too terrified to move, to do more than whimper at Moritori's approach.

"You pathetic _worm_," Moritori snarled. "That bleeding heart I call a son has more courage than you. How do you keep beating me? Why won't you just _die_?"

Spectre cringed at the anger in his voice.

"Still, you've survived this long," Moritori continued. "You could be of some use, after all." He lunged for Spectre, grabbing the child with his free hand and swinging down with the other.

_unknown place, unknown time  
_  
Spectre woke with a start, or he thought he did. But such was the way of dreams, that he could wake from one only to find himself trapped in another.

Such was this dream.

He found himself gasping for air. His throat was dry. His lungs felt scorched, as when the fire had first consumed him.

He lay still, too exhausted to move, barely strong enough to continue breathing, slipping in and out of consciousness, before he saw something move in front of his face. Something, some sort of medical mask, was placed over his muzzle, and he began breathing in mercifully moist air.

Such was the way of dreams, that he heard things he would never have noticed while awake. Yet the things he heard made no more sense here than if he'd been awake.

"Are you _insane_?" a young voice demanded. "What are you trying to accomplish, bringing a Guardian here?"

"I knew you were soft, Luger," Moritori replied, "but I never thought you were so _dense_. He's strong, stronger than the rest of them combined, and him all untrained. Otherwise he could never have survived his... _accident_. But _they_ can't control him; we _can_."

Luger, the younger one, shook his head. "You can't expect to keep him here," he protested. His voice shook. "They'll slaughter us all when they find out."

Moritori waved off the protest. "I won't need to keep him, not once he's under my control."

"You can't..." Luger froze. "You can't mean to modify him now. Father, he's younger than _I_ am, and _I'm_ not even old enough. There's a _reason_ we don't modify children, dammit; it'll _ruin_ him!"

"Oh, you're just breaking my heart," Moritori replied, with a sneer in his voice. "He is a tool, a weapon, not that poor stray that followed you home." He smirked. "But if the brat's well-being bothers you that much, let that be your incentive to get it _right_ this time."

Luger clenched his fists, but said nothing more. He selected a bottle from the table next to Moritori, filled a fresh syringe with the chemical inside, and approached Spectre...

_Echidnaopolis Community Homes  
Spectre and Kali-Ka's house  
midnight  
_  
Spectre woke with a start and a gasp. His heart pounded, shooting his dwindling supply of oxygen throughout his body. His steam suit went into overdrive to replenish that supply, but his panic had him panting faster than the thing could manage; his throat and lungs burned with the effort, and he came dangerously close to passing out again three times.

_A dream. Only a dream. It wasn't happening... again._

He finally managed to slow his breathing to a manageable level. Still, the nightmare — the memory — had left him too terrified to sleep again just yet, and he was too restless to simply lie still and do nothing.

He climbed out of bed and paced through the house. He heard the gears in his legs and left arm moving, felt them turning, allowing him to walk with some semblance of a normal gait. Very few people would ever see the true extent of what the Dark Legion had done to him.

This... "Luger" had done him that mercy, at least, that even Spectre's medical records did not betray his shame. If anyone _had_ managed to see them — and he rather doubted they had — that one had mistaken them for part of the chameleon's steam suit he wore, and ignored them as inconsequential.

Few enough knew what the Legion had done to him. Almost _no_ one knew what it cost him merely to survive.

_There's a _reason_ we don't modify children, dammit, it'll _ruin_ him!_ "Ruin" him, indeed, and not just from the shame of bearing the Legion's mark. While the chameleon's suit could be adjusted as he grew, the cybernetics had to be fitted to the wearer's body precisely. Had he been one of theirs, the fire would have been reason enough to modify him so young, but the cybernetics would have been replaced with every growth spurt.

But he was not one of theirs. And something had made the Brotherhood and the Fire Ant Council wary after the first time. There had been no opportunity, no further encounter with the Legion, in far too long...

And though the cybernetics gave him back much of the physical strength the fire had robbed from him, they had twisted him, as a broken bone might be twisted when it is not set right before healing. They had left his natural body crippled, and not even Jani-Ca's technomages — former Legionnaires both — had found a way to restore him.

"You had that dream again," a woman's voice said from behind him.

Spectre turned his head towards her voice. He listened to the cybernetics in his neck, expanding and retracting, to allow him this movement. "What dream is that?"

"The one that leaves you clutching your arm," she replied, "as though it were some viper you were fighting."

Spectre couldn't very well deny her claim when he was doing exactly that. He forced himself to relax, and beckoned to her with the offending arm.

It took her thirty seconds to walk five feet to join him. A full three minutes longer than Jani-Ca would have taken.

It was not fair, he knew, to compare Kali-Ka to his first wife, but it was difficult not to. They were both strong women, both fully capable in what they did... and there the similarity ended.

Jani-Ca had been an excellent judge of character, needing little more than a single meeting to decide whether or not to trust a stranger, and never required proof that her trust was rightly given. And such strangers, whether because they truly deserved that trust or because of their gratitude for it, worked hard to earn it time and again.

Kali-Ka... trusted no one, not even her own husband. She would never have agreed to marry him, had Jani-Ca not suggested it as a cover for whatever sort of intimacy Kali-Ka needed to heal him.

Jani-Ca had always put her loved ones ahead of her own needs, even when it was his job to protect _her_. She'd been so confident in her own strength that she'd refused to see the threat that Spectre could become.

Kali-Ka had Jani-Ca's fate to serve as warning. And Sojourner needed a mother more than Spectre needed a wife, no matter how much the boy resisted the idea. No, not even the healer dared get any closer to Spectre than he permitted, and that only when she had no other choice.

Which made consummation nothing short of impossible, a point that Kali's siblings teased him about mercilessly.

Speaking of... "What did your, ah, sibling want," Spectre asked, "when, ah, you were visited yesterday?"

Kali-Ka snickered at the awkward phrasing. "Oh, will you just admit you can't tell them apart, already?"

"I'm afraid of giving them the satisfaction," he muttered. That and she laughed so rarely; he quite enjoyed finding some way to amuse her, even when it was at his own expense.

"Then pluralize them; everybody else does." Her body trembled slightly with the effort to hold in her laughter. "But to answer your question, Tyson loaned me one of the books from his library. He thinks it —"

Spectre held up a hand to silence the explanation. "Never mind," he said with a smile. "If it belongs to them, I'm sure I don't want to know anything about it. I'll not be blamed for another one of their pranks."

Kali-Ka snickered again. "You're learning," she replied.

_Twilight Cage  
Dark Legion warehouses  
a few years ago  
_  
Luger skimmed through the reports again, but no matter how many times he read them, the numbers simply would not add up to what he wanted.

Food was limited to half-rations for everyone. Medicine was virtually non-existent. And both were dwindling rapidly. The only supplies that were produced regularly any more were weapons, and even those suffered, as such Legionnaires as were skilled in their production found themselves drafted and forced to join the fighters, or more likely finding their way into the infirmary with no one to care for them.

At the rate things were going, Moritori's new training regime would kill the Legion faster than the outside world ever could... _unless_ Luger cut the non-combatants' rations to a quarter or less, or began putting them to death. Moritori's law had no place for those who could not slaughter his enemies.

_Dammit, father, _why_ can you not see mercy as anything but a weakness?_ Even their ancestor Voalt was said to have shown _mercy_ to his enemies, and history had feared _him_ as some sort of demon! But Moritori — indeed, many of the Legion — felt that Luger was poorly lacking in ambition, though they could never see where those ambitions truly lay. Luger, however, felt that looking after his own people was far more important than fighting some ridiculous war older than he was.

True, Luger had visited the other colonies in the Twilight Cage... to replenish the Legion's supplies. True, Luger had led many a raid to test those colonies' defenses... but the war had been going on so long, neither his people nor the other colonies would have accepted a peaceful treaty.

True, he'd even gone along with his father's plan to use that Guardian. But Moritori would have become suspicious if he had not.

And Luger had _not_ installed the memory neutralizing chip that his father demanded, and had made certain the boy's controls were tuned to his own cybernetics. Ideally, so Luger imagined, the Guardian should remember him, not as a _kidnapper_, but as the one who restored him from his injuries.

Well, _ideally_, Luger would have had years to continue working on him, to upgrade the cybernetics as the child grew, but it would have been impossible to keep him in the Twilight Cage for all that time.

But even lacking that ideal, Luger would make certain that the boy would never become Moritori's tool. No, if Spectre _was_ to be a weapon, it would be Luger's own ambition and none other that wielded him, to put an end to this war, and to those who would not hesitate to slaughter his people.

So Luger had sent forth his own spies to watch, to decide if that weapon would ever be needed. And, with any luck, to offer whatever aid they might, should Spectre's cybernetics prove to be a different sort of problem.

"_Hey, boss_," a voice said over his earpiece.

Luger's mouth twisted in a wry grin. _Speak of the devil..._ He switched on a monitor to reply to one of his better agents. He had no fear of eavesdroppers; if the technomages couldn't keep their communications with him secure, no one could.

Tyson's face appeared on the screen... or was it Elys-Ia? _One of these days I'm going to figure out which one is which... _without_ getting flashed again_. Luger grimaced at the thought. It still embarrassed him, even now, to remember when the twins had done _exactly_ that, when he'd been foolish enough to admit that he couldn't tell them apart.

_Tricksters, the pair of them, and not an ounce of shame to share._ That alone had marked them as worthless to the fight, and therefore beneath Moritori's regard. Even Luger would not have given them a second glance, had he not discovered their hoard, a library filled with books from countless zones and concealed within a pocket universe of their own making.

He did _not_ want to know where those books came from, nor why they ranged from such innocent subjects as cooking — albeit cooking with ingredients Luger had never heard of — to different forms of necromancy. Knowing the twins, the books had not been come by honestly, and Luger did not want to take responsibility should their original owners ever track them down.

But the twins had proven, time and again, to be adept at moving from one zone to another, even to the outside world without anyone's knowledge. It was simply a pity that they could not take anyone with them.

"Yes?" Luger asked.

"We've just come back from the Constable," the technomage said. "Seems he's still looking into that fire."

Luger nodded. The accident that had brought Guardian Spectre to the state Luger had seen him in. "That would be... how long ago?" Time flowed oddly within the Twilight Cage — that Nocturnus woman, Adi-Ra, was proof enough of that. But the flow was stranger yet between the zones; there was simply no predicting how much time had passed on the outside.

"Long enough," the technomage replied with a growl. "_More_ than long enough."

Luger opened his mouth to snap at the technomage for the vague answer — he was _not_ in the mood for one of the twins' riddles — and then noticed the agent's expression. "I see," he said. There would be no recovery for Spectre; manipulating the cybernetics _now_ would leave him crippled for certain. "And what has the Constable learned?"

"One of his informants was rummaging around the kid's home," the technomage replied. "Found some kind of circuitry they'd never seen before. The Constable asked us if we recognized it."

The silence stretched on. "_And_?" Luger prompted.

"It was one of the Legion's, all right. So we checked the building over, just in case..." The technomage swallowed. "Luger, it was a _detonator_."

"Deton —" Luger's eyes widened. "That damn _liar_! He said it was an accident!" He began pacing and growling to himself.

"What do you want us to do?" the technomage asked.

"Just... just keep watching," Luger replied, once he'd calmed down slightly. "See what you can do to help the Guardian — I know, it's too late to remove the cybernetics, but you might make things easier for him. Let me think..." The twins' younger sister. She had all the sense that they lacked, and she was quiet enough that Moritori barely knew she existed. "Kali-Ka's been training with that Nocturnus healer; I might be able to slip her over to you the next time I get the portal open..."

"Sir?"

"That bastard is _not_ playing his games with _me_," Luger snarled.

* * *

**Re: The technomage twins, brother and sister Tyson and Elys-Ia.  
It was _so_ tempting to call them Fred and George or some gender- and species-appropriate variation. But instead I went with a sibling pair that showed up somewhere in one of my other short-lived fanfics... though the funny thing is, I don't remember _that_ version being particularly nice.**  
**I know, technically brother and sister "identical" twins are impossible, or might as well be (if they're different genders, they have different genetics, and are therefore not identical), and fraternal twins (or the extremely rare "semi identical") are no more similar than any other siblings. I threw in the "can't tell them apart" gag because I decided it was funny. ;)**  
**And on that note, Spectre's rather awkward phrasing translates to something like "what did your brother/sister want when he/she visited yesterday". Except that question would require him to (a) admit that he can't tell them apart, (b) refer to one person and risk getting it wrong, or (c) pluralize them, even though only one had paid a visit that particular instance.**


End file.
